Is machine learning icing on the cake for data scientists?

Image: iStock It is getting more and more difficult to avoid being touched by machine learning (ML). If you buy products from Amazon, make bids on eBay, or stream the latest episodes of Narco on Netflix, chances are, your experience has been shaped by an ML algorithm that makes informed assumptions on what your preferences are, or predicts what they will be. If you allow Facebook to tag friends in your photographs, you are taking advantage of deep-learning algorithms trained for recognizing human faces, and if you take a series of photographs on your Android device, Google will piece together a storyboard of the highlights of your weekend. It’s the same for businesses, even if they don’t necessarily realize it. There was a study recently published by natural language analytics…